How to Make Basic Home Decor for Yourself or Your Etsy Shop | Etsy Education Molly Margaret Studio

Ready to start designing your own home decor or need some help making Etsy prints to sell? Make your own home decor like you find on Etsy using free resources. See below for step by step instructions on how to begin making unique art for your home, friends or even as a business!

Here’s what we’ll be making today, this is a great tutorial to base more design work on or to make your own home decor using custom quotes or meaningful words for you.

Resources used:

Free Font Options: Dafont.com | Paid Font Options with Commercial Licensing: Creativemarket.com

Adobe Photoshop | Apple Pages

Any questions? Comment below!

Before you get started | Research and select a font to use (if you don’t have one you love already)

You can select from many free fonts for personal use on dafont.com or go to Creative Market for great paid options that will come with a commercial license if you plan on selling the prints.

I like to use handwritten style fonts, script fonts or modern fonts.

To download fonts in Mac:

Open the folder (unzip first if needed) that downloaded from either site and contains the new font, double click the .ttf file - this will open your font book, select install font

To download fonts to a PC:

If you have Windows 10, open the folder that contains the new font, right click the font file and select install

Another great thing about Creative Market are their weekly free design products, it’s absolutely worth signing up for their notifications.

Photoshop Instructions:

If you plan on making digital art in photoshop, which I recommend if you’re trying to sell the art or want to print large scale projects, check out these instructions. If you don’t have access to photoshop or have no idea how to even open a new project there - scroll down to the Apple Pages instructions, which are easy to reflect into Microsoft Word.

Step One | Open a new white background document sized 16x20 (or whatever size you’d like your image to be) 300 dpi (default setting anyway but good to check just in case).

Step Two | Using the horizontal type tool, make three separate text boxes or layers with the words let’s stay home - or whatever words/phrasing you’d like.

I explain it a bit more in the video, but keeping each line or word of text on different layers help you maintain more control over the final look of the project through individual word size changes, position etc.

Step Three | Select all three layers using the move tool and adjust the size by selecting a corner square of the transform controls (the box that shows up around the words) and while holding the shift key - make the box smaller or larger. At this time I also center the words together.

Step Four | Ta-Da! It’s done! It’s that easy.

If you want to sell the print be sure to save it at a high quality size, I even keep photoshop file copies in case another size is requested so I can easily adjust the sizing without sacrificing the quality of the print.

apple pages Instructions:

If you don’t have access to photoshop or don’t want to pay for the subscription through Adobe, you can easily use Apple Pages or Microsoft Word to create your prints for personal use.

Step One | Open a new document - it’s convenient that apple pages defaults to a regular printer paper sized document, you can easily cut the paper to fit your frame or adjust the print sizes in the program.

Step Two | Type out the phrase you’d like to print.

Step Three | Change the font to the one you downloaded and the size.

Step Four | To make your design look more professional, make adjustments to the line height which will bring the words closer together or further apart.

Step Five | Center your text and add spacing above and below it as needed. (You can also just make it all in a text box and move with your curser)

Step Six | It’s done! Print and put in an 8x10 frame, enjoy!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Let me know if you have any questions.